"Any
project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be
accomplished for awfully close to free."

A
prime example of this law would be Wikipedia. Seth explains, "Wikepedia
took advantage of the law of the Mechanical Turk. Instead of relying on a
handful of well-paid people calling themselves professionals, Wikipedia thrives
by using loosely coordinated work of millions of knowledgeable people, each
happy to contribute a tiny slice of the whole."

"The
internet has turned white-collar work into something akin to building a pyramid
in Egypt. No one could build the entire thing, but anyone can haul one brick
into place."

So
how is it that we have arrived at a place in education where instruction can be
provided by a computer and an Internet connection?

Roger Martin, author of The Design of
Business, would say we have driven the teaching (not all) of students through
the "knowledge funnel.”

Mystery-Knowledge
Funnel Stage 1: Roger describes this stage as the “mystery.” Ask questions and
exploring the mystery. For example, "What should students be able to do or
what should they know when they complete school." Or maybe, "What
should education look like?"

Heuristic-
Knowledge Funnel Stage 2: A heuristic is a general rule of thumb. We create a
rule of thumb because it helps us break down our question or our mystery of
into a manageable size. As Roger describes it, "It is a way of thinking
about the mystery that provides simplified understanding of it and allows those
with access to the heuristic to focus their efforts."

In
teaching a heuristic might be that we should start by connecting to prior
knowledge and then build background knowledge or that we want to have student
engaging each other. Another might be that using graphic organizers helps
student better organize the information they are working with. Its what we
would call best practices. Generally, it is a rule that should be followed in
teaching a lesson, etc.

Algorithm-Knowledge
Funnel Stage 3- Roger describes stage 3 this way. " As an organization
puts its heuristic into operation, studies it more, and thinks about it
intensely, it can convert from a general rule of thumb...to a fixed formula.
That formula is the algorithm..." We might call it research based. There
is validity and reliability to applying the algorithm. We get the result we
want each time we apply the formula.

So
I am wondering as Educational knowledge is being driven through the knowledge
funnel, are we still in the mystery stage, the heuristic stage, or have we
arrived at the algorithm stage? The mystery of stage 1 requires the asking of
questions and seeking of problems to solve. The general rule of thumb required
of the heuristic in stage 2 requires some artistry. The algorithm of stage 3,
standardized, codified, honed, and refined to such a point that ultimately
anyone could with access to it could deploy it and achieve more less the same
results.

As
Roger Martin points out, the ultimate destination for the algorithm is computer
code. "Once knowledge has been pushed to a logical, arithmetic, or
computational procedure, it can be reduced to software."

Isn't
this what much of the current developments in educational software is doing. A
student responds to the software and the software responds with what is needed
next. Over time and with enough opportunities the software is able to move the
student through all the required learning tasks it was designed to provide and
do so using research based methods to instruct these tasks

Teaching
on the algorithmic level.

Now
if teaching can be achieved on the algorithmic level then Seth Godin might say,
"It only follows, then, that as you eliminate the skilled worker...then
you also save money on wages as build a company that's easy to scale. In other
words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable
workers."

Teachers
viewed as interchangeable. Is this possible? Is this something that software
designers and on-line learning researchers would desire?

Online
learning is opening the doors for thousands of willing students and willing
students to connect and to break down knowledge into smaller pieces. The
teacher in the classroom is slowly losing his or her monopoly to an online
crowd or teachers who have the knowledge and expertise to teach their subject
to thousands of willing students who want to connect and learn at their own
choosing.

Is
online learning disruptive enough to begin the making the classroom teacher
dispensable?

Seth compares the Dispensable Employee vs. Indispensable Employee

Dispensable
Employee

"The
cause of the suffering is the desire to of organizations to turn employees into
replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less
need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this
commoditization."

"The
future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It's easy to buy a
cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef
book."

Are
we in education chefs or cooks?

Artists
or house painter?

Composers
or players of musical instruments?

Architects
or builders?

Movie
producers or movie viewers?

The
inventor or the factory worker?

Designers
or users?

Teachers
or computer code?

Do
we adjust to the new reality described by Seth and become indispensable?

Indispensable
Employee

"The
indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her
organization. She is the key player, the one who's difficult to live without,
the person you can build something around."

Design
Thinking, which I think is a powerful approach to re-designing education,
requires a sense of humanity at its core. Teaching and learning is
fundamentally a human experience. Teachers, along with students, provide the
human experience that makes the learning experience so powerful. Teachers are
indispensable to a well-designed learning experience. My hope is that teachers
are never replaced with code.

The design I am looking for is an indispensable teacher,
not an algorithm.

February 02, 2010

During my current foray into Design Thinking I have been
reading and enjoying the book The Design of Business by Roger Martin. In it I
came across a brief primer by Jennifer Riel on what are known as wicked
problems.

After reading it, I was struck by just how wicked the
problems we face in education can be.

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by
mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy,
confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of
wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class of
social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is
confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting
values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly
confusing."

Take the issue of technology. How much technology is enough
in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure
it? How do we pay for it?

Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach
creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught?
If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and
bad creativity?

Or how about the questions of making students go to school
longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about
breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay
teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as
you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What
does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain?
How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge,
what is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it
scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution? As you try to answer
these questions more questions arise. It really gets...wicked.

"The causes of the problem are not just complex but deeply
ambiguous; you can't tell why things are happening the way they are and what
causes them to do so.

The problem doesn't fit neatly into any category you've
encountered before; it looks and feels entirely unique, so the problem solving
approaches you've used in the past don't seem to apply.

Each attempt at devising a solution changes the
understanding of the problem; merely attempting to come to a solution changes
the problem and how you think about it.

There is no clear stopping rule; it is difficult to tell
when the problem is "solved" and what that solution may look like
when you reach it."

Jennifer says, "With hard problem, your job is to look at the situation, identify a set of definite conditions, and calculate a solution. With wicked problems, the solution can no longer be the only or even the primary focus. Instead, dealing with the wicked problems demands the attention be paid to understanding the nature of the problem itself. Problem understanding is central; the solution, secondary. It's no wonder that so many designers have come to embrace the notion that their role is to work with wicked problems."

If, as Roger Martin warns, "Organizations dominated by
analytical thinking are built to operate as they always have; they are
structurally resistant to the ideas of designing a and redesigning
themselves...over time. They are built to maintain the status quo"

Education will have to solve its wicked problems by
designing solutions.

Tim Brown, CEO of the design company IDEO and author of
Change By Design says, "By integrating what is desirable from the human
point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable,
designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking
takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who
may have never though of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly
greater range of problems."

And most importantly, design thinking helps you,
"...grasp the needs the of the people you are trying to serve."That
means the needs of our students. Solving wicked problems to serve our students
is why educational design thinking is a welcome and needed approach in
education. Using design thinking to solve the wicked problems of education is Education Innovation.

January 28, 2010

Should schools get better at what they do or find better
ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March
believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities,
exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of
payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new
strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine,
hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of
education.

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration
of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering
their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that
focuses only on exploration. “An organization exclusively dedicated to
exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone
will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the
next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student
achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the
good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses
solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an
early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the
business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to
exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last
somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates
value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t
keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the
cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods,
strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is
inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the
results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between
exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking.

“The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to
balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration
of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance
finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering
effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective
methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding
better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking. That is Education
Innovation.

January 26, 2010

In the book Influencer:
The Power to Change Anything, the authors
discuss the idea of the power of the environment to influence behavior. In
chapter titled Change the Environment, the authors share the power of “things”
on the environment and behavior, and how often we miss their powerful influence
because of two reasons.

First, often the most powerful elements in our environment remain invisible
to us. “Work procedures, job layouts, reporting structures, etc., don’t exactly walk
up and whisper in our ear.” The environment affects much of what we do, but we
often fail to notice its impact.

Second, even when we do think about it, we aren’t sure we know how it is
impacting us or we may not know what to do about it.

Students spend much of their waking youth in school. 12-13 years, 180 days a
year, 6 hours a day, in school. More specifically, they spend this time in
their classrooms, at their desks, sitting in a chair.

I have been thinking and reading a lot about Design Thinking. In his book
Change By Design, author and IDEO CEO Tim Brown says that a prerequisite for
creative cultures, “…is an environment—social but also spatial—in which people
know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their
faculties.”

He goes on to say that, “They physical and the psychological spaces of an
organization work in tandem to define that effectiveness of the people within
it.”

12-13 years sitting in a chair. Do you think the type of chair students
spend the majority of their youth influences behavior? It is possible that the
type of chair might impact the approximately 13,000 to 14,000 hours spent
sitting in it?

The pinnacle of educational design seems to be the plastic chair. Does that
chair say something about our educational system?

Maybe it says, “This as good as it gets.” Or it might say, “We do what we
have always done because it works.” Possibly it says, “The reliability of the
past is more important than the validity of our current situation.”

But what if we allowed design thinking to create a new chair, a new system? Which
would make the most positive influence on behaviors in the classroom? Which one
do our students deserve to spend the majority of their waking hours as a child?
What is our school environment saying about our priorities? Which would you
rather spend your time in learning?

January 19, 2010

When Professional Learning Communities or Professional
Networked Learning Collaboratives develop plans and ideas to deal with the multifaceted
issues of student learning and achievement, having a clear definition and
picture of what success looks like is key. Teams need to know what success
looks like so they can recognize if they have achieved the results in student
learning and achievement they set out to attain. If you don’t know your
destination, how will you know if you have arrived? Developing an observable
measure of success is key.

Tim Hurson, author of the book Think Better, offers this
useful tool for helping you recognize once you have achieved it. He calls it
DRIVE.

Do:What do you want your eventual solution to do? What must
it achieve?

What outcome is the PLC or PNLC looking for? What do you
want for the students? What should your students be able to do? The key here is
to develop as many ideas as possible without judging them. Create a list of all
the things your teams solution should achieve for the students. For example
your list might include statements like: increase time on task, help student
develop their own questions, include technology, or students should be able to
explain the learning goals clearly.

Restrictions:What changes or impacts must you avoid?

What outcomes should not happen as a result of your plan?
What must be prevented so as not to interfere with the student achievement? For
example your list might include statements like: don’t confuse students, don’t
ignore the high achieving students, don’t talk to much during the lesson, or
don’t confuse students with too many strategies.

Investment:What resources are you willing to allocate? What
are your “not-to-exceeds”?

What are the investments of time, materials, etc., that your
PLC or PNLC is willing to commit to achieve your goal? Create a list of maximum
investments that your PLC or PNLC, those you can’t exceed, that your team is
wiling to put into the solution. The list might include things like: 30 minutes
of instruction daily, one instructional aide per classroom, science materials
for each pair of students, computer lab time, once weekly common assessments,
etc.

Values:What values must you live by in achieving your
solutions?

List the values of the school and the team that cannot be
compromised in working toward the solution. What can you tolerate? What can you
not tolerate? The list might includes things like: standards over curriculum,
student need over teacher need, differentiation, must value teacher time,
student engagement, etc.

Essential Outcomes:What are the nonnegotiable elements of
success? What measurable targets must be met?

What are all the things that must happen for the PLC or the
PNLC to consider the solution a success for students? What specific student
achievement outcomes must be reached? What are the non-negotiable student
results that must be achieved? Examples might include statement like: all
students will master the standard, the student learning will be measurable
through a common formative assessment, students will be given multiple
opportunities to achieve, etc.

When PLCs or PNLCs use the DRIVE tool to create a clear
picture and an observable criterion for defining success, they have a greater
chance of ensuring that their solution will produce the desired result for
student learning and teaching.

In their chapter titled The Sales Force Makes The Sale, they write about the "sacred cow" that it is a great sales force that sells the product.

The authors butcher this sacred cow.

“When great ideas get turned into great products, a strong Sales Force is essential. They can make the difference between never quite catching on and mega-success. But when lousy ideas get turned into lousy products, even the greatest Sales Force on Earth can’t help you.”

What’s this got to do with education you ask? I am glad you asked?

When great lesson planning gets translated into great lessons, a strong teacher is essential. They can make the difference between the student never quite getting it and the lesson being a great success. But when lousy lessons planning gets translated into lousy lessons, even the greatest teacher can’t help you. The lesson is the product, and a great product needs a great sales person, in this case a teacher, to make it a huge success. It's a partnership of well crafted lessons and instructional sequences, and the sales force, the teacher that makes it all go.

But, they also include the other famous "sacred cow" that the product should sell itself.

How does this sad cow meet its end? “In most instances, consumers do not buy products. They buy benefits. A product is more than the sum of its parts. It needs to solve problems, create opportunities, makes us feel better about ourselves and the world around us. These benefits are not usually obvious to the naked eye.”

In most instances student do not just accept they need to learn what the teacher is teaching. They learn because of the benefits to them. A great lesson is more than the sum of its parts. It needs to investigate, innovate, imagine, explore, experiment, examine, collaborate, create, and connect to the students’ lives. These benefits are not usually obvious to the naked eye, but it is up to the teacher to demonstrate these benefits. You need a great product and a great sales force.

“…the customer still needs to know why they should want what you’re selling. They need to be told what it will do for them.”

Students still need to know why they should want to learn what your teaching. They need to be told, explained, and demonstrated what it will do for them.

“Charles Revson [Founder of Revlon cosmetics] once said, “In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the drugstore, we sell hope”

December 10, 2009

Do your assumptions about what education should be leave you with a lack of alternatives?

One of the reasons why many people, including myself, love books like Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, or The Economic Naturalist is that is takes our assumptions about the world around us and stands them on their head. When what we assumed about our world is discovered to be incorrect, we must develop alternatives in our thinking and our approach to the world around us.

We have created a model of education based on our assumptions about what education is. So let's consider our educational model.

As part of the book The Organization Of The Future, James O’ Toole contributed an essay titled “Free To Choose: How American Managers Can Create Globally Competitive Workplaces” In his essay he describes 3 “Emerging Employer Models.” He describes them as follows:

Low-Cost Companies

They are paid at (or close to) the minimum wage.

They receive few if any benefits

They have no job security

They are given only the amount of training needed to do jobs that have been designed to be simple and easy to learn.

Global-Competitor Companies

Increasingly hire people on a contractual basis and, where possible, outsource and offshore work.

Offer their “contingent” workers no security beyond the time limits
of their contracts, and no promises of a continuing employment
relationship.

Often look outside to hire even permanent and top-level employees,
carefully limiting how much they respond on developing managers and
professionals, let alone on the training of workers.

Frequently offer “then new employment contract,” in which they
commit to telling employees what their strategy is and where they think
future jobs in the organization will be, and workers then are told that
their continual employment depends on their performance and the fit
between their skills and the needs of the business.

Are constantly searching for workers with the skills needed for
today’s challenges. And although they pay top dollar for that talent,
they expect employees to work long hours and, especially, to be
productive.

High-Involvement Companies

Challenging and enriched jobs

A say in the management of their own tasks

A commitment to low turnover and few layoffs

A relatively egalitarian workplace, with few class distinctions
between managers and workers and relatively small ratios between the
salaries of the CEO and the average worker

Jobs organized in self-managing teams

A strong sense that every employee is a member of a supportive community

Extensive, ongoing training and education to all

Salaries rather than hourly wages

Employee participation in company stock ownership and a high share in company profits

O’ Toole advocates for the High-Involvement Company as the model of the future.

According to James O’ Toole,
the most successful companies now and of the future will be those that
choose to address the deepest needs of their employees. • Financial resources and security• Meaningful work that offers the opportunity for human development• Supportive social relationships

So, to which model would the current system of education belong?

Does the current education model meet the 3 deepest needs of it's employees?

Is
education, as a governmental organization, so unique that none of the
models described above apply? Is it a hybrid of one, two, or all of
them?

It is our assumptions about what education is, where and when learning and teaching takes place, and how education,
school districts, and school sites should be organized that control the
current organizational face of education. We have built what we assumed is the best organization and model for delivery of instruction to a population.

What, however, if those
assumptions are wrong?

Have you ever considered the fact that the assumptions you make about what education is and what is should be are wrong?

As O’Toole puts it, “Remember,
it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to
decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was
assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed
while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full
benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated
blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught
managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC
Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be
closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved
otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in
a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered
alternatives.”

Are there alternatives to our current model?

Does education have alternatives? Are
educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will teachers, union
leaders, parents, and politicians allow for different assumptions to be pursued? William A. Foster said, “Quality
is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention,
sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it
represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Is what we have built the "wise choice of many alternatives", or is it simply what we have ended up with?

Archibald MacLeish once said, "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice." Wil education and those in it ever have the freedom to develop and create alternatives to the current model. Will we be free to pursue the The High-Involvement Company or the Global-Competitor Company, as described by O' Toole, or a hybrid of the two, or even something not yet discovered?

As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”

December 01, 2009

Innovation should not be linear. Most of us are familiar with examples of the great innovation teams from the business and engineering world. Examples such as Xerox- PARC’s group, to Apple’s Macintosh group, to Lockheed Martin’s famous “Skunk Works” have lead many of us to believe that innovative ideas should be developed by groups of “creative people” somewhere outside of school and then be brought into the school for teachers and administrators to execute. That is linear innovation and linear innovation should not be the goal of schools and school districts. Innovation should not be separated from schools and the district.

“If innovation is linear, the idea stage can be separated out and placed in a more creative unit of the organization, and the execution can still take place in a more traditional bureaucratic structure.”

Many of us have been conditioned to believe this is the way is should work in our schools. Let the experts come up with the ideas and then tell us what to do. But if we allow that mindset to continue then the schools or school districts never develop the capacity to bring their creativity, knowledge, and ideas to bear. Simply sitting back and waiting for other to think it up for us does nothing to develop innovation abilities.

Sawyer points out that,"... although separation can be good for short-term creativity, it interferes with long term innovation: An isolated “skunk works” usually has trouble communicating with the rest of the organization because innovation requires collaboration across the company.”

In other words, for the long-term benefit of the school or district, the best innovation is not linear, but lateral. We need to innovation and create together because everyone at the school or in the district is needed to collaborate on the new idea of innovation to effectively implement it and embed it. Collaborating laterally, across the team, the grade level, the department, the school, and the district.

Different cultures, different styles of communication, and different perspectives are natural barriers to those on the outside of the school or district. It makes it difficult to interface with the school or district, which are being asked to execute their innovations.

“The skunk works model places all its hope on one big flash of inspiration that must come from a select group of special people. But we’ve seen that even the most transformative new products and systems emerge from many small sparks of insight. Successful innovative companies keep these small sparks inspiring the next one.”

Lateral innovation occurs when teacher and administrators working next to each other day-in and day-out collaborate on these “small sparks” of insight and inspiration to produce innovation from within. These innovations are more likely to overcome the barriers that innovation from outside faces. Lateral innovation has more buy-in, is more contextual, and more focused.

If you want to make innovation a strength and capacity of your school or district, don’t look outside for linear innovation, but look inside for lateral innovation.